Portuguese Grand Prix – Haas’ Romain Grosjean was knocked out in Q1 and says he had a suspension issue that caused problems.
Both Haas drivers were knocked out in the first part of qualifying at the Portimao circuit in Portugal. Armed with the Soft tyres, Grosjean did a 1:18.643 on his first run, improving to 1:18.364 on his second run.
This wasn’t enough to get through into Q2, and the French driver said afterwards that he couldn’t have done much more. Having scored points last time out at the Nurburgring, his first points finish since 2019, Grosjean explained the circuit characteristics aren’t playing to the Haas’ cars strengths.
“Looking at the layout of the circuit here with the low-speed corners, it was always going to be difficult.” said Grosjean. We’re also suffering from rear overheating on my car on the suspension, the balance was changing lap after lap. I don’t know where we’ll end up in the race. More uncertainty – such as rain, as I said at the Nürburgring, is the best for us. We can maybe pull something out of the hat.”
Grosjean said he is enjoying the circuit, but he’d make some changes to improve it further: “The circuit is pretty cool, it really is a rollercoaster. I would add some gravel in turn one and turn four to get rid of the track limit issue, that would also spice things up on the high-speed corners.”
Grosjean will start the race from P18, a single place ahead of Kevin Magnussen after beating him by a tenth and a half.
“Some frustration today.” said Magnussen afterwards. “We had a problem with the car that meant we could only do two laps on every run – we had been planning to do three laps, at least on the first set of tires to learn as much as we could. On top of that I had traffic on my second lap on the first run, so I didn’t learn a lot on that run. We were just on the backfoot for the next outing. Considering all that, I think I did a decent lap, it was the best that I could do. Clearly we don’t have the pace but we’ll do what we can for the race. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
